University computer translates brain signals into words - Funded by U.S. Defense *

The extract below from the Daily Mails shows that a University can convert thoughts from the human mind to words on a computer screen. The article talks about good intentions, as always, about helping disabled people. However the University of Utha’s website shows who funded this project revealing the Defesne (police and military) intentions behind it:

“A computer that can read human minds has been unveiled by scientists.

“It translates thought signals into speech through sensors placed on the brain.

“Researchers say that in more than eight out of ten cases they were able to work out which word was being thought of without the subject saying it out loud.

“‘We were beside ourselves with excitement when it started working,’ said Bradley Greger, a bioengineer who led the research at Utah University.

“‘It was just one of those moments when everything came together. I would call it brain reading.

“Scientist Stephen Hawking, who suffers from motor neurone disease, has used this method to write books and ‘talk’.

“They attached two small grids of 16 electrodes to the speech centres of the brain of an epileptic patient, who had had part of his skull removed for another operation to treat the illness.

“A computer then recorded the signals in the patient’s brain as he repeatedly read each of ten words that might be useful to a paralysed person: yes, no, hot, cold, hungry, thirsty, hello, goodbye, more and less.

“The patient was then asked to say the words out loud and the computer matched the brain signals for each word with a success rate of between 76 per cent and 90 per cent.

“‘This is proof of concept,’ he said . ‘We’ve proven these signals can tell you what the person is saying well above chance.’

“The study was published in the Journal of Neural Engineering.”

When you look into technology reports you find out so called breaking news research by universities have already been fully developed by the military years or decades earlier and that universities are merely re-discovering/re-searching what had been done before (an example of this can be read here). There are different levels of technology, one of the highest being military classified technology like some of the planes they revealed in the first Iraq war. DARPA (U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) funds lower level university re-search when they want to bring out advanced technology to the public arena. There is no need to connect electrodes and wires to read the brain, it can be done remotely/non-invasively without the target person even knowing about it as AFP, the oldest and one of the largest news agencies in the world, reported in 2008:

“The tool used by the University of California at Berkeley neuroscientists is functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a non-invasive scanner that detects minute flows of blood within the brain, thus highlighting which cerebral areas are triggered by light, sound and touch.

“They notched up a 92-percent success rate with one volunteer, and accuracy was 72 percent in the other. The probability of this happening on the basis of chance — i.e. the computer picking the right image out of the 120 — is only 0.8 percent.

How are they planning to use this technology? An article from the Guardian in 2007 tells us:

“A team of world-leading neuroscientists has developed a powerful technique that allows them to look deep inside a person’s brain and read their intentions before they act.

“ability to probe people’s minds and eavesdrop on their thoughts, and raises serious ethical issues over how brain-reading technology may be used

” “Using the scanner, we could look around the brain for this information and read out something that from the outside there’s no way you could possibly tell is in there. It’s like shining a torch around, looking for writing on a wall,” said John-Dylan Haynes at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany, who led the study with colleagues at University College London and Oxford University.

” “These things are going to come to us in the next few years and we should really be prepared,” Professor Haynes told the Guardian.

“The use of brain scanners to judge whether people are likely to commit crimes is a contentious issue that society should tackle now, according to Prof Haynes. “We see the danger that this might become compulsory one day, but we have to be aware that if we prohibit it, we are also denying people who aren’t going to commit any crime the possibility of proving their innocence.”

“what you can be absolutely sure of is that these will continue to roll out and we will have more and more ability to probe people’s intentions, minds, background thoughts, hopes and emotions.“What have the scientists developed?
They have devised a system that analyses brain activity to work out a person’s intentions before they have acted on them.

“How does it work?
The computer learns unique patterns of brain activity or signatures that correspond to different thoughts.”

Before the government courts had to prove you were guilty, now people behind this technology not only say you have to prove your innocent (which you are supposed to be if you have not taken action in committing a crime) but that you also have to be innocent of not having a momentary bad thought in fantasy that if acted out in reality might be breaking the law. When these things get put in airports to “fight terrorism” and used remotely by the police like their portable x-ray scanners, thinking about corrupt bank bailouts or what you’d like to do to those paedophile politicians who recently got caught could land you in trouble. If the public don’t acquiesce then this technology will not be allowed for police and military purposes and you don’t have to be concerned by it. Unfortunately the public have acquiesced to everything so far with the label “fighting terrorism” or the label “for your safety” slapped on it.